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Battle of the Boxes Review: BookedBox

A few weeks ago, I published a review on OwlCrate, one of the many book subscription boxes that have popped up in the past couple of years. Today I am going to bring you a review of the second box I subscribed to, BookedBox. BookedBox is a curated subscription box that offers its subscribers the opportunity to receive personally selected books, culled from an interest survey and their GoodReads accounts.

There are three subscription levels for BookedBox: the "Beefy BookedBox" ($39.99 per month or $228.99) the "Standard BookedBox" ($34.99 per month or $379.99 annually) and the "Bare Bones BookedBox" ($15.99 per month or $89.99 annually). Subscribers of the Beefy BookedBox receive two personally selected books and about five bookish goodies; subscribers to the "Standard BookedBox" receive one book, an art or literary magazine, and some bookish goodies; lastly, subscribers to the "Bare Bones BookedBox" will get one personally selected book.

For review purposes, I subscribed for a monthly "Beefy" subscription; May was going to be my first BooedBox. As a consumer, the concept behind BookedBox intrigues me: having sometime review your interests, your reading history, and the books that you have flagged as being interesting to you and select something specifically for you. However, my experience as a BookedBox subscriber didn't live up to my excitement or my expectations for quality consumer service.

To begin with, the boxes were meant to ship by the 20th of the month . . . but they did not. Subscribers were sent an email making vague excuses about illness and shipping delays but were assured that boxes would ship by the 23rd. As promised, I received a USPS Priority tracking number . . . however, for six days, the shipping information only said that a pre-shipment information had been received. Ostensibly, a shipping label had been created for my box but my box had not been shipped.

To make matters worse, my subscription to BookedBox was renewed even before I had received my first box. So, by May 29th, I had paid for two boxes but I had yet to receive a single parcel.

Annoyed, I emailed the company and made three demands:

By the end of the next business day, I wanted a refund for the auto-matic renewal. I hadn't had a chance to sample the May box, so it was a questionable business move to charge me for a second box before the first had arrived. I let it be known that if I didn't have a refund by the end of the next business day, I would be contacting my credit card company and filing a fraud report against BookedBox.

I wanted to have my BookedBox subscription cancelled. Even if I ended up liking my May box, I did not want to support a company whose business ethics were questionable at best.

I wanted to either have my original May box mailed [finally] or I wanted to have a replacement box expedited to me. By all accounts, I should have had my box five days before I sent the email, so make me have to wait any longer for the product I ordered was a clear violation of the merchant-customer agreement we entered upon at the time of my subscription.

Two of my demands were met: I was give a refund for the auto-renewal and my box was finally dispatched. According to the tracking information attached to my box, the parcel hadn't even made it to the post office until the day after I contacted BookedBox . . . despite their claims that all of the boxes had left them at the same time. Riiiiight.

BookedBox made numerous excuses for why the box was delayed—the distributor was behind in processing, illness that impacted distribution—however, when you are running a small business in a saturated market, the quality of your customer service will be the determining factor in your business's success or failure. A litany of excuses does not pass for quality customer service.

The demand that was not met was having my BookedBox subscription cancelled. After I was issued a refund I went into my account to insure that I was in fact no longer subscribed to BookedBox. I was not so I had to manually unsubscribe myself. Even though the process of unsubscribing myself was an easy one, it should have been taken care of by the company. As a consumer who had already been needlesslyinconvenienced, the company should, by rights, taken care of this step for me.

After all of the trouble I went through to get my box, when it finally arrived, I was less than impressed by its contents:

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (paperback)

Brilliance by Marcus Sakey (paperback)

Chocopods mini candy bar by Chuao Chocolatiers

Mini Apple PieLarabar

English Breakfast Tea by Novel Teas (2 bags, not packaged in a sachet)

Ultra-Mini Paint Chip Notebooks

Book Covered Matchboxes by Portmanteua Paper Co. (not shrink wrapped)

Unbranded postcards

For starters, both of the books were paperbacks. Most book box subscription services send their users hardbacks—this is one of the virtues of subscription boxes, that you are discovering new literature at a lower than retail price. The cost of the two paperbacks together doesn't even cover the cost of the box. Additionally, of the two books that were selected for me, only one of them—The Housekeeper and the Professor—is one that interests me.Brilliance, on the other hand, is a fantasy novel that doesn't spark my interest; in fact, I will probably put this one in my classroom library and see if my eighth graders next school year will be interested in it.

Similarly, the snacks that were in my box were also nothing to write home about. Both the Chocopods and Larabar were miniature . . . and snacks that I can pick up at the Target three blocks from my home. The tea bags from Novel Teas were also disappointing because they didn't come wrapped in sachets, rather, they were loose inside of the box. Does that strike anyone else as being slightly unsanitary and, in a box of items that could puncture the bag, potentially messy?

The paint chip notebooks disappointed me as well. Quite literally these look like a Pinterest art project: they are paint chips from a hardware store folded over tiny pieces of paper to create a minuscule notebook. Honestly, I am not even sure I could write half of my phone number on these notebooks. What practical use could they sever? To make matters worse my box contained two literary-themed match books that were not shrink wrapped. For starters, isn't that a dangerous inclusion in a highly flammable book box? Secondly, not every item with a literary theme warrants inclusion in a book box. To round out my box, I received a few postcards which I will use as bookmarks but that weren't anything special—a phrase that sums up BookedBox perfectly.

BookedBox isn't anything special. The box is overpriced for the quality of the items that you are sent. Taken as a whole, BookedBox charges a hefty price for a box of cheap, hastily put together goods. There isn't a theme that ties the box's contents together other than haste. Compared to other book boxes out there like OwlCrate and Book of the Month, BookedBox is sorely lacking: even it's novel concept—concierge book discovery—can't make up for the fact that the execution is a profound disappointment.

Moving forward I will continue to subscribe to BookedBox nor would I recommend the service to my friends, family members, or readers. You're better off spending your hard earned $40 on GoodReads recommendations you pick up from Amazon.

***Please note I purchased this BookedBox on my own and the thoughts contained in this review are mine exclusively, based on my personal experience with the service.***